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For a while now, I'm working on a crawler crane. As discussed elsewhere, progress has stopped and this topic is an attempt to jump start the build again and finish it so it can join my collection. So here it goes:

The project started with the launch of the 42042 Crawler crane and was a simple MOD at first, but quickly evolved into two MOCs. It didn't like the proportions of the body and cab of the 42042 and wanted to add some features like expandable or removable tracks.

The first LDD sketches looked something like this:

bfkuo7.jpg

As some will probably notice, at this point I was still considering to make its larger brother the Liebherr LR1250 as well as a HS855HD. The LR1200 plan has been dropped, because it was simply a bigger version of the 8288 and brought nothing new. During my research, I found the HS855HD was more interesting, because it's a so-called duty cycle crane, a very versatile machine designed to do repetitive tasks efficiently, for example dragline work, soil compacting, (un)loading bulk materials etc. One of the consequences is the fact it has a free fall function on some of its winches, making it possible to drop the bucket or tool to either save time or to provide impact force (you can see this feature in

and
). This seemed a nice function to try to implement in my MOC.

After a few trial and errors, I came up with this internal mechanism:

20l1dna.jpg

(The newest clutch parts are not used yet in this image)

The controls are very similar as in the 42042: each winch has one switch with two positions: one for winding up the winch, one for winding it down. It is powered with the L motor of the 42042. My addition is the clutch system (in yellow) for the green and blue winch. Push the lever and the winches are simultaneously disconnected form the rest of the system and will unwind under the weight of the tool attached. Releasing the lever will allow the spring to re-engage the yellow clutches, linking them again to the drive.

Meanwhile, I also wanted to capture the looks of this machine. It has linked manual expandable tracks, a tiltable cabine, and a inspection hatch. This is the current state of the tracks and body:

28wi1ao.jpg

At the moment, the bottleneck is the fact that the clutch system has too much back-lash or too much play to fully disconnect. I need to move the spring closer to the lever I think, which is rather challenging due to the compact build. Another issue to be solved is the expandable tracks which seem to snag on the chassis when under load.

I would like to make my MOC as versatile as the real machine and design the parts to convert it in a dragline, double hook, clamshell bucket or foundation excavator configuration.

To be continued ...

Edited by Cumulonimbus

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This seems a rather interesting project, you really have thought over why you want to build this. The goals you describe are cool, especially the convert options...

Looking forward to see it's progress!

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